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Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

Conveying Your Design Intent with Drawing Creation in Draftsman For many businesses, drawing creation is a critical step that is often neglected during product development. Alternatively, electronics companies that are employing drawing creation are doing so with dated applications, preventing them from reaping the full benefits of smarter, more cost-effective solutions. While this step may seem discretionary, taking this extra measure can make all the difference when communicating your design intent and Read Article
Where Will the Next Generation of PCB Designers Come From? OnTrack Newsletter August 2017 On Track Newsletter August 2017 VOL. 1 No 5 Welcome to the August edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. It seems like every electronics industry event where PCB designers gather, the conversation inevitably drifts to questions about where the next generation of PCB designers are going to come from. The old guard is retiring, yet their replacements don’t appear to be filling the vacancies they leave behind. From my perspective, I see many ways Read Article
New Altium Documentation So just how do you avoid creating a content dinosaur? Every so often, you stand back and ask, “is this working?”. Well, we’ve done that, and the answer was no. The content was simply too old, had too much missing, there were too many mistakes, it was too hard to find anything, and would take too much work to fix! It was old content that had started life being paper/pdf-based, which had not traveled well as it first moved to a wiki, then on to a Read Article
Board Layer Stackup Considerations for High Speed Board Design I’ve been designing boards for a long time; however when I began my career, the boards I designs were pretty simple. Most of them were small low speed designs with very few restrictions on them. Test boards and control panels, I cannot tell you how many simple 2 and 4 layer boards I have designed in my career. That being said, as my skills increased, so did the complexity of the boards that I designed. A particular high point for me was when I Read Article
Introduction to High Speed PCB Designing: Is FR-4 the Best Board Material Choice for High Speed PCB Design? We’ve all been there at one time or another when we’re tasked with a project that lies outside our comfort zone. For me, that day came when my boss asked me to design a high speed board. While I considered myself to be a somewhat experienced PCB designer, I knew that high speed PCB design has many restrictions that you do not normally encounter when you’re designing an average circuit. Initially I invested time into making my schematics Read Article
Maximizing PCB Cooling with Best Design Practices for Surface Mount Heat Sinks: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Maximizing PCB Cooling with Best Design Practices For Surface Mount Heat Sinks. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us Read Article
Using Grounding to Protect Your PCB from ESD Damage: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Using Grounding to Protect Your PCB From ESD Damage. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article
Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article
How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in Read Article
Design To Cost with Increased Supply Chain Visibility It’s easy to overlook supply chain costs until it’s too late. Electronic design teams face a daunting challenge of meeting deadlines and cost objectives in rapidly fluctuating global markets. With ever-shorter time-to-market requirements, design teams need to understand and mitigate against supply chain risks during the design phase. This is particularly crucial since choices made during the design phase impact 70% of the life cycle cost of a new Read Article
PCB Circuit Design Tips: Standard vs. Specialized Component Selection As a kid, I was fascinated by hovercrafts. These nearly frictionless vehicles go from land to water without pause and spin 360s on demand like a carnival ride. I knew that the cost of a full scale build would require mowing every yard in the county, so instead I started by constructing a homemade radio controlled model. It worked beautifully on ponds and flat parking lots, but in our hilly corner of the woods, the sleek craft required all of the Read Article
Multilayer PCB Design: Manufacturing Boards for High Voltage PCBs One of my favorite movies is the original Shrek. It was thrown into the nerd vernacular of my friends and siblings, along with more traditional sources of quotes, like Star Wars. One scene particularly stands out, when Shrek explains to Donkey that ogres, like himself, are complex creatures. “Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.” Donkey points out that not everyone likes onions, but everyone Read Article
Expert PCB Design Advice from the Pros: OnTrack Newsletter July 2017 On Track Newsletter July 2017 VOL. 1 No 4 Welcome to the July edition of Altium’s On Track newsletter. In Rock Stars and Superheroes we continue with part two of our conversation with signal integrity guru Rick Hartley, who shares some timeless wisdom for today’s EE and PCB designer. In Maker Space, you will enjoy learning about team Badgerloop from the University of Wisconsin. These undergrad underdogs are just weeks away from their 2nd SpaceX Read Article
PCB Design Guidelines for Designing Solar Powered Embedded Systems: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: PCB Design Guidelines For Designing Solar Powered Embedded Systems. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you Read Article
How to Plan Your PCB Layout for a High Voltage Design: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: How To Plan Your PCB Layout For A High Voltage Design. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article
High Speed PCB Design Guidelines: An Overview for Getting Started: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: How Speed PCB Design Guidelines: An Overview for Getting Started. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you Read Article
Learn from the Master of Signal Integrity: OnTrack Newsletter June 2017 On Track Newsletter June 2017 VOL. 1 No 3 If the PCB design galaxy had Jedi knights, Rick Hartley would be the Obi-Wan Kenobi of signal integrity. In this month’s edition of Altium’s On Track newsletter, you will have the unique privilege to hear first-hand about Hartley’s failures and triumphs throughout his design career. Next month, in part two of this interview, he will share a few of his “Jedi mind tricks” and offer some advice for today’s Read Article